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I Love Scapple; You Should Too!

Sometimes when you’re in the planning stage of constructing your story, it can be difficult to keep track of all of your ideas – especially if you’re still undecided about what ideas you’re going to use and what ideas you’re going to discard. Figuring out timelines of individual characters, their relationships to one another or the history of your fictional world (particularly for us fantasy/sci-fi types) can be a complex process. I spoke before about how I like to brainstorm in a notebook, but notebooks have one major weakness when it comes to refining your story: they’re a bit on the small side. Even if they have a million pages, you still can’t spread out all your ideas in front of you at once; much less easily organise and rearrange them.

Corkboards or spreading out your notes on your kitchen table is one way around this, but they have limited room too (they can also get really untidy and that can leave you feeling more confused than ever). There is plenty of mind-mapping software out there, of course, but its usefulness can be limited if you’re experimenting with many different ideas at once, because they force you to make logical connections between each note. Thankfully, the good people who gave us Scrivener have done it for us again.

At first glance, Scapple by Literature and Latte might appear to be just another piece mind-mapping software claiming to possess the secret of eternal creativity but in actual fact, it is quite different in a few important ways; ways which make it the ideal tool for those of us who have a million different ideas they need to organise and have been unable to find a large enough whiteboard or a thick enough packet of post-its.

‘Freedom’ is the word that comes to mind when I think about Scapple. Freedom to organise all your thoughts (however many, and however big or small) into whatever order you want, in whatever style you want and with remarkable ease. One of the main freedom-endowing features Scapple has is that it allows you to place notes anywhere on the board, which you may choose to connect or not connect to other notes as you see fit. If you want to link your notes together, you can do it using arrows, two-way arrows or dotted lines. You are also not bound to work from a single central note as you are in mind-maps (though you certainly could do this if you wanted to). Each and every note you add to your board will be a free and independent note, which you can connect to or disconnect from as many other notes as you wish – assuming you choose to join any of your notes together at all. You can also easily surround some or all of your notes with a ‘background shape’, which keeps them together. All of this makes it ideal for experimenting with many different ideas at once.

If you’re like me, you probably find that colour-coding your notes is a big help when you’re coming up with new ideas. Fortunately, it’s easy to customise the style of your notes to make them look exactly how you like them. The bulk of the customisation Scapple offers is available through the non-intrusive ‘Inspector’, which includes two tabs: one for customising the note style of whatever note you have selected at the time, and another for customising the format of the overall board (background colour/image, default font, etc). By default, Scapple comes with a few pre-made note styles that you can easily select by simply right-clicking the note(s) you want but you will probably find yourself quickly wanting to create your own note styles that you can re-use. Fortunately, it’s easy to create re-usable note styles by simply creating one bubble in the style you want and then choosing ‘New Note Style from Selection’ in the Format->Note Style menu. Not only that, but you can also redefine pre-existing note styles and even import note styles from another Scapple board (saving you the hassle of re-creating your custom note styles every time you start a new board). You can also add images as notes simply by dragging the file from your File Explorer directly onto the board and of course, as this little gem was indeed conceived by the same minds which gave us Scrivener, you can easily import notes from Scapple into Scrivener simply by dragging them into Scrivener’s Binder.

For me, however, Scapple’s usefulness doesn’t end once I’ve refined my basic idea. Once I’ve decided what story I am going to write, Scapple can be of further use for creating useful diagrams such as timelines. For the novel I’m currently working on, I used Scapple to create a timeline which allowed me to mark off where individual story beats came in and how this related to the progress of the protagonist’s character arc. This allowed me to see the whole functioning skeleton of my story, with all its individual elements working together in a format which was very clear and easy to work with. Additionally, the freedom Scapple gives you to add notes anywhere on your board meant that I could still easily add notes-to-self on any points which I was concerned about (of which there were a few!).

I really would like to come up with a few negative points for the sake of giving a balanced review of this product, but its simplicity, ease of use and freedom to do what you want with it makes it a really great product with very few cons that I can think of (incidentally, I’ve also found a few other non-fiction related uses for it). It’s available for Mac and PC and is also available as a 30-day free trial (that’s 30 days of use, so you don’t need to feel under pressure to use it every day for a whole month) so why not give it a go? If it’s a way to organise and plan your novel that you’re looking for, I’m sure that Scapple won’t disappoint you.